The Library of Congress began collecting tweets in 2006. By 2013 the archived tweets numbered 170 billion. They stopped collecting individual tweets in the fall of 2017.
While the daily ins-and-outs of a late-Victorian, St. Catharines farmer might be very exciting to us today, consider just how mundane our own daily lives will seem to historians in the 22nd century. Tweets about what content Netflix should make available for streaming, memes, cat photos, and a selfie with a group of friends at brunch will be just as interesting to them, as John Burdy’s diaries are to us.
Return to Victorian Tweets Introduction
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